4 ms·

Perhaps the UN privacy chief should actually read 1984, then he would realise how silly he sounds.

by PlzSnow 11y ago

cryoshon 11y ago
It's perfectly reasonable: in 1984 they didn't have cell phones or internet histories. No chances for Big Brother to snoop on what kind of information you're seeking or what kinds of comments you'll make when you think you are anonymous. No physical tracking device on people at all times. No network construction of who each individual talks to and when; no harvesting of metadata. 1984 had a bunch of CCTVs without enough people to monitor all of them, no recording capacity, and an extreme political indoctrination regime to help make up the difference by having informants. Ingsoc is a child's view of dystopia, now-- we have far surpassed it.
- varjag 11y ago
  Do you really believe you are in a dystopian world surpassing 1984?
  - opnitro 11y ago
    I think he means we have the capabilities to be in a world surpassing 1984.
    - varjag 11y ago
      Doesn't mean much if the capabilities aren't being exploited. 1984 wasn't a book about technology. It did feature mass surveillance exceeding anything we have today, even if described in 1940s state of art terms.
      - ptaipale 11y ago
        Not to mention the political oppression and violence enabled by that surveillance. Even most lynchings by a Twitter mob aren't actual executions where someone is really killed (although sometimes someone might be pushed to suicide by the psychological pressure; that is still a far cry from an actual political purge with murder.)
      - cryoshon 11y ago
        The actual surveillance of 1984 was facile compared to today; today we are infinitely more surveilled than was described in the book. We carry cell phones which are fountains of data regarding our communications and movement, and we use the internet, which is a very large window into the content and often intent of our minds, not to mention ANOTHER fountain of information about our location and communications. On top of that, there are probably more CCTV cameras, dashcams, airborne cameras (with ARGOS), and body cameras today. Hell, they even have microphones and cameras in public buses / bus stops / metro trains. These cameras are all infinitely more utile than in 1984 once they are linked to facial recognition and gait recognition technology. In 1984, you could be an unnoticed face in a crowd if you weren't under investigation-- not so in our reality. You step outside, and the fact that you did so is tied to your identity and dossier and noted for later. Like I said before, Ingsoc of 1984 was a primitive surveillance society which still relied on humans to manually collect data on each other's conversations and movement patterns. It just doesn't scale as cleanly as an automatic computer system does. There wasn't any ability to create dossiers on 100% of people passively, nor was there any ability to sort people based off of various patterns, nor was there any ability to build sentiment maps, etc. As far as exploitation goes, I'm not going to say that our society is blatantly coercive using surveillance in the way that Ingsoc was. Wild abuses of the surveillance apparatus is utterly undeniable, however. Consider that whistleblower Russ Tice has said that Obama was being surveilled before his presidential term. Consider the terms "LOVEINT/SEXINT" and the JTRIG group. These are serious, democracy-eradicating abuses whose purpose is blackmail, not finding terrorists. I will also say that the current trend of politicians trying to outlaw cryptography and the sentiment there there should be nothing beyond the government's reach is taking us even further into totalitarian territory. Then there's the whole "we never voted or asked for this and now it won't go away" thing. As far as I can tell, the government doesn't have the consent of the governed to pursue these programs.
        ptaipale 11y ago
        > We carry cell phones which are fountains of data But only because we choose to. We don't have to.
        11y ago
  - imglorp 11y ago
    I believe we are watching one be born. The pieces are all in place and there doesn't seem to be a way to stop it. We are already seeing abuses of the power that ubiquitous surveillance gives the government. Subversion of checks and balances by the oligarchy has been underway for decades.
  - agd 11y ago
    If the only thing that needs to change to enable that world is a policy document, then it's just as bad.
    - varjag 11y ago
      Consider that every time you drive in traffic, your life is at mercy of other people. The only thing preventing the driver of that 8-wheeler from ending your life is his (and other people's) general sanity and good will. It is certainly not the lack of technical ability: you are literally one decision away, no paper even has to be signed. Similarly, as long as society remains healthy at large, not pushing itself to the brink where emergent properties of dictatorship take over, I believe we are safe. In contrast, for a rotten society you don't even need advanced technology to make everyone's life miserable, as been proven many times over in modern history.
      - cryoshon 11y ago
        Society isn't healthy at large. Wealth is massively concentrated, and has a larger sway in things than democratic routes. The government has been on a 30 year warpath in the Middle East, with no sign of stopping. Torture has been forgiven; gulags for the tortured are accepted and permanent. A huge percentile of the US population is in prison or on parole-- far larger than other countries. Aside from this, the government used a terror attack as an excuse to start removing civil liberties in a slow march.
        varjag 11y ago
        GULAG was a system of combined labour/death camps. By comparing it to Gitmo you only insult the millions victims postmortem and devalue the rest of your point. There must be a term for it; I can only describe it as reverse Marie Antoniette attitude. The problems of modern Western societies, while numerous and deep, are nowhere near dystopian levels yet. I lived the initial part of my life in USSR, arguably in the period when it gave up doing communism full strength. Still, 1984 ring true in very special way. Not just the basic concepts of oppression, surveillance and lies, that you can argue in any society with a government. By reading it you instantly recognize the behavioral traits of your friends, your parents, teachers and yourself in a shockingly precise and fitting manner. The 1984 is not a stretch of imagination, not a metaphor or a fitting analogy where you supposed to "draw parallels". It's a description of a totalitarian society modeled on totalitarian societies of the time and people subjugated by them. It's an anti-totalitarian, anti-communist text that always caused problems to the Western political left by its uncomfortable, uncanny plausibility. Hence the endless efforts to re-interpret it as we have here.

Perhaps the UN privacy chief should actually read 1984, then he would realise how silly he sounds.

by PlzSnow 11y ago

Perhaps the UN privacy chief should actually read 1984, then he would realise how silly he sounds.

It's perfectly reasonable: in 1984 they didn't have cell phones or internet histories. No chances for Big Brother to snoop on what kind of information you're seeking or what kinds of comments you'll make when you think you are anonymous. No physical tracking device on people at all times. No network construction of who each individual talks to and when; no harvesting of metadata. 1984 had a bunch of CCTVs without enough people to monitor all of them, no recording capacity, and an extreme political indoctrination regime to help make up the difference by having informants. Ingsoc is a child's view of dystopia, now-- we have far surpassed it.

varjag 11y ago
Do you really believe you are in a dystopian world surpassing 1984?
- opnitro 11y ago
  I think he means we have the capabilities to be in a world surpassing 1984.
  - varjag 11y ago
    Doesn't mean much if the capabilities aren't being exploited. 1984 wasn't a book about technology. It did feature mass surveillance exceeding anything we have today, even if described in 1940s state of art terms.
    - ptaipale 11y ago
      Not to mention the political oppression and violence enabled by that surveillance. Even most lynchings by a Twitter mob aren't actual executions where someone is really killed (although sometimes someone might be pushed to suicide by the psychological pressure; that is still a far cry from an actual political purge with murder.)
    - cryoshon 11y ago
      The actual surveillance of 1984 was facile compared to today; today we are infinitely more surveilled than was described in the book. We carry cell phones which are fountains of data regarding our communications and movement, and we use the internet, which is a very large window into the content and often intent of our minds, not to mention ANOTHER fountain of information about our location and communications. On top of that, there are probably more CCTV cameras, dashcams, airborne cameras (with ARGOS), and body cameras today. Hell, they even have microphones and cameras in public buses / bus stops / metro trains. These cameras are all infinitely more utile than in 1984 once they are linked to facial recognition and gait recognition technology. In 1984, you could be an unnoticed face in a crowd if you weren't under investigation-- not so in our reality. You step outside, and the fact that you did so is tied to your identity and dossier and noted for later. Like I said before, Ingsoc of 1984 was a primitive surveillance society which still relied on humans to manually collect data on each other's conversations and movement patterns. It just doesn't scale as cleanly as an automatic computer system does. There wasn't any ability to create dossiers on 100% of people passively, nor was there any ability to sort people based off of various patterns, nor was there any ability to build sentiment maps, etc. As far as exploitation goes, I'm not going to say that our society is blatantly coercive using surveillance in the way that Ingsoc was. Wild abuses of the surveillance apparatus is utterly undeniable, however. Consider that whistleblower Russ Tice has said that Obama was being surveilled before his presidential term. Consider the terms "LOVEINT/SEXINT" and the JTRIG group. These are serious, democracy-eradicating abuses whose purpose is blackmail, not finding terrorists. I will also say that the current trend of politicians trying to outlaw cryptography and the sentiment there there should be nothing beyond the government's reach is taking us even further into totalitarian territory. Then there's the whole "we never voted or asked for this and now it won't go away" thing. As far as I can tell, the government doesn't have the consent of the governed to pursue these programs.
      - ptaipale 11y ago
        > We carry cell phones which are fountains of data But only because we choose to. We don't have to.
        11y ago
- imglorp 11y ago
  I believe we are watching one be born. The pieces are all in place and there doesn't seem to be a way to stop it. We are already seeing abuses of the power that ubiquitous surveillance gives the government. Subversion of checks and balances by the oligarchy has been underway for decades.
- agd 11y ago
  If the only thing that needs to change to enable that world is a policy document, then it's just as bad.
  - varjag 11y ago
    Consider that every time you drive in traffic, your life is at mercy of other people. The only thing preventing the driver of that 8-wheeler from ending your life is his (and other people's) general sanity and good will. It is certainly not the lack of technical ability: you are literally one decision away, no paper even has to be signed. Similarly, as long as society remains healthy at large, not pushing itself to the brink where emergent properties of dictatorship take over, I believe we are safe. In contrast, for a rotten society you don't even need advanced technology to make everyone's life miserable, as been proven many times over in modern history.
    - cryoshon 11y ago
      Society isn't healthy at large. Wealth is massively concentrated, and has a larger sway in things than democratic routes. The government has been on a 30 year warpath in the Middle East, with no sign of stopping. Torture has been forgiven; gulags for the tortured are accepted and permanent. A huge percentile of the US population is in prison or on parole-- far larger than other countries. Aside from this, the government used a terror attack as an excuse to start removing civil liberties in a slow march.
      - varjag 11y ago
        GULAG was a system of combined labour/death camps. By comparing it to Gitmo you only insult the millions victims postmortem and devalue the rest of your point. There must be a term for it; I can only describe it as reverse Marie Antoniette attitude. The problems of modern Western societies, while numerous and deep, are nowhere near dystopian levels yet. I lived the initial part of my life in USSR, arguably in the period when it gave up doing communism full strength. Still, 1984 ring true in very special way. Not just the basic concepts of oppression, surveillance and lies, that you can argue in any society with a government. By reading it you instantly recognize the behavioral traits of your friends, your parents, teachers and yourself in a shockingly precise and fitting manner. The 1984 is not a stretch of imagination, not a metaphor or a fitting analogy where you supposed to "draw parallels". It's a description of a totalitarian society modeled on totalitarian societies of the time and people subjugated by them. It's an anti-totalitarian, anti-communist text that always caused problems to the Western political left by its uncomfortable, uncanny plausibility. Hence the endless efforts to re-interpret it as we have here.